For natural history buffs, it's something very important to document. For a photographer, it's a dream assignment.

Australian Museum archive manager Vanessa Finney said photography was "hugely important" in moments like this.

"The way that you can see this flood with the benefit of drone photography and sophisticated aerial photography is probably completely different to the way it was photographed in 1974. It gives us a different view of the landscape.

"Every time you photograph an event like this, at 50-year intervals, it's a different event because the way you see it is so completely different."

The ABC's Wild Abandon story received a lot of feedback from the public. One of the strongest messages was "thankyou", but the other line we heard was: 'What am I looking at exactly?'.

"You just do not know what they are. You can't tell if it's the land or sea, which is up or which is down," Ms Finney said.

So, what are we looking at?

The shapes the salt makes

The combination of desert sand, dry earth, salt plains, floodwaters and new growth created unrecognisable shapes.

And despite the vastness, ABC photographer Brendan Esposito found the most compelling story was in those details.

"I spent many hours flying over Lake Eyre and the surrounding areas focused on all the shapes and the magic light," he said.

At this moment, the sand here is dry and the photo captures salt markings on the surface:

"We've got the benefit of very large and very high-definition computer screens to look at this on, so the amount of detail that we've got access to is very different to previous floods," Ms Finney said.

Ms Finney said while photographs were often confined to the archives, keeping and displaying shots of significant moments in natural history was as important as ever.

"They record today, but in the future they'll tell us a lot about the past," she said.

"As rain events are changing so fast, who knows what's going to happen in the future and the archives are a place you can go and see what happened in the past."

The Australian Museum is currenting exhibiting Capturing Nature, a curated collected of photographs from 1857 to 1893 — "a time when photography was revolutionising science, art and society".